Week 15. Wildcart week

In short

This week we are allowed to use any machines or fabrication methods that we have access to and we haven’t tried during Fab Academy. Our Fab Lab visited Ashot’s metal factory for this week where I’ve done a project using plasma cutter.

I wanted to have a notebook holder for me and use it when I am in Fab Lab, so I made it. I’ve seen sheet metal section in Fusion but never used it, so I thought I can do modeling with this feature.

Plasma cutting and sheet metal

Add new component as regular, but select the type: sheet metal.

Here we can also select Sheet Metal Rule which is the thickness of material and bending parameters.

I started with sketch of base part which is bottom part and continued stretching from the edges with Flange tool and Extrude.

Added Voronoi pattern to reduce the weight and make air circulation available under notebook. For that I used Voronoi sketch generator addin. Link here. Voronoi Sketch Generator Addin

Run the Installer and install the package.

Now in the Utilities section in ADD-INS > Scripts and Add-ins > Add-Ins appears this add-in, which we can start by pressing Run. Then in Create section appears this feature.

Then we need to select sketch where will be generated the pattern. I made a rectangle on the top surface of the stand. Also can click on Use Profile Size button to insert exact sizes of sketch.

Here we have parameters and styles which can be adjusted.

I got this, but edited sketch manually to delete cells which are too close. Then selected cells and extruded all down to delete create holes.

With the feature Unfold (Sheet metal > Modify > Unfold) created a flat model. And then continued in Manufacture section.

Here in Fabrication section created a Setup and toolpath 2D profile. At first selected inner contours, then again created another 2D contour toolpath and selected outline contour.

in Post processing window searched for the machine’s name FlashCut, which was in Fusion library. Selected.

In settings named the file and hit Post. That’s all for generating g-code.

Manufacturing

Transferred the file into machine, here is information screen on the plasma cutter. This machine can cut range of metals (steel, aluminum, stainless steel, cast iron). material thickness can vary to 40mm.

Info

CNC plasma cutting uses a high-temperature, electrically conductive gas (plasma) to almost instantaneously melt metal sheets. A high-pressure localized gas stream is used to evacuate the molten zone to cut through the metal sheet.

Source

Material I cut is 3mm thickness steel.

Not forgetting about safety

There was a risk for 3mm sheet could be deformed because pattern was too tight but fortunately it was okay. I should have tried with thinner sheet for product to weight less.

Mhkitar, our technical support helped to polish and remove sharp edges.

Then we marked the bend parts. We didn’t have bending machine so thanks so much to Mkhitar for struggling but bending it manually.

For that he did not deep slits with a grinder on the surface. And accurately bended the metal with hammering all the bending parts.

Heroshots

Here is a result

Conclusion

For this I made a notebook stand with plasma cutter. In general I like the result and I use it for my notebook in our lab, but I would change some details in design and I would rather use thinner sheet like 2mm for the next time if I made it again.

Source flies

• .f3d file